---
title: 'Codebuff Best Practices'
section: 'tips'
tags: ['review', 'best-practices']
order: 1
---

# Codebuff Best Practices

Learn how to use Codebuff to streamline your code review process.

## Start in a Git Repo

Ensure you're in a Git repository before starting Codebuff. This will allow you to track changes that Codebuff makes to your code.

If Codebuff introduces an issue you don't like, you can easily revert to the previous version.

## Leverage `.gitignore` in your repo

Codebuff will ignore files specified in your `.gitignore` file. This allows you to specify files that you don't want Codebuff to read, like configuration files or build artifacts.

If there are files you want to keep tracked in Git, but you don't want Codebuff to read, you can create a `.codebuffignore` file in your repo.

## Planning

Codebuff is really good at ad-hoc changes, but sometimes you have bigger features to build. You can ask Codebuff to help plan out all the details of your feature before you start coding!

Do a long brain dump of your feature, with as much technical detail as you want to consider. Don't worry about formatting it nicely.

Then, ask Codebuff to `re-word what I said in a goal-oriented plan, and output that to a `plan.md` file in markdown format.

Codebuff will write out what it thinks is the best way to implement your feature, and you can use that as a starting point! Make sure to read through it carefully and adjust anything needed.

Then, you can simply ask Codebuff to build the feature, using the `plan.md` file you both collaborated on as a guide.

## Include docs via pasting a link

Make Codebuff even smarter by connecting it with external documentation:

- Include URLs in your messages and Codebuff will automatically scrape and convert them to markdown format
- Add documentation links to your knowledge.md files for automatic scraping on startup
- Perfect for:
  - API documentation
  - Framework guides
  - Library references
  - Design patterns
  - Stack Overflow solutions
- The scraped content becomes part of Codebuff's context, helping it provide more accurate assistance
- Example: "Here's the docs for the library I'm using: [url]. Can you help me implement feature X following their best practices?"
